Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Such obstacles to reception are not, it’s true, found in sf alone. The usual way to express rhetorical singularity in a discourse is to define its practice—the text it writes, and the readings it elicits—as a genre. So it is one of the virtues of otherness that sf can exist at all, to the snug pleasure of its inducted readers and the equally snug consternation of those excluded from its codes and mega-texts.

  Notes

  1. Jonathan Culler, Barthes, Fontana, 1983, p. 24.

  2. From Brecht on Theatre, ed. J. Willett [London, 1964], cited in Marxism and Literary Criticism by Terry Eagleton, Methuen, 1976, p. 13.

  3. Gregory Renault, “Science Fiction as Cognitive Estrangement: Darko Suvin and the Marxist Critique of Mass Culture,” Discourse No. 2, 1980.

  4. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick, UMI Research Press, 1984, p. x.

  5. Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 74-5, 99-100.

  6. Darko Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power, G. K. Hall: Boston, 1983, p. 419.

  7. Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction, The Women’s Press, 1988, p. 5.

  8. An argument advanced compellingly by David Lodge in The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, metonymy and the typology of modern literature, Arnold 1977, and Working with Structuralism: Essays and reviews on 19th and 20th century literature, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

  9. A use of the grammatical tool authorized by Samuel R. Delany in an early paper reprinted in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes of [sic] the Language of Science Fiction, [1977] Berkeley Windhover, 1978, p. 31 et sequ. Briefly: “A distinct level of subjunctivity informs all the words in an s-f story at a level that is different from that which informs naturalistic fiction, fantasy, or reportage. [. . . Heinlein’s] ‘the door dilated,’ is meaningless as naturalistic fiction, and practically meaningless as fantasy.” (pp. 31, 34). As sf, it confirms, while enacting, the text’s radical “futurity” or “otherness.”

  10. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in narrative and structure, especially of the fantastic, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

  11. Philippe Hamon, “Un discours constraint,” Poétique 16 [Le discours réaliste], 411-45, cited Brooke-Rose, p. 85.

  12. Delany, op. cit. See my “Reading by Starlight: SF as a Reading Protocol,” in Science Fiction #32, ed. Van Ikin, pp. 5-16.

  13. Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown, Kent State University Press, 1979.

  14. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space. The American Science Fiction Film, [1980] 2nd, enlarged edition, Ungar, 1987, p. 66.

  15. I draw these examples from Sobchack’s discussion of these films and others in her chapter on sf iconography.

  16. See Marie Maclean’s useful discussion, influenced by Marc Angenot’s “The Absent Paradigm” (Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 6, pp. 9-19), in her “Metamorphoses of the Signifier in ‘Unnatural’ Languages,” Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 11, pp. 166-173.

  17. Perhaps one might say “the dialect” as well as the “dialectic,” in view of the daunting or off-putting effects of sf-specialized tropes correctly noted here by Wolfe.

  18. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign. Criticism and its Institutions, Blackwell, 1988, p. 101.

  19. Amis called him “a kind of science-fiction poet laureate of the countryside” (New Maps of Hell, p. 62), a countryside stocked with grouchy but loyal robots, talking dogs, paranormal powers around the cosmic village pump . . .

  14

  Time travel and the mechanics of narrative

  David Wittenberg

  “What happened to me?” I whispered to the lady at my side.

  “Pardon? Oh, a meteor got you, but you didn’t miss a thing, believe me, that duet was absolutely awful. Of course it was scandalous; they had to send all the way to Galax for your spare,” whispered the pleasant Ardritess.

  “What spare?” I asked, suddenly feeling numb.

  “Why, yours, of course.”

  “Then where am I?”

  “Where? Here in the theater. Are you all right?”

  “Then I am the spare?”

  “Certainly.”

  —Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries

  Anyone who thinks about time travel for a while is likely to encounter something like the following dilemma. On the one hand, time travel stories would seem to constitute a minor and idiosyncratic literature, a subtype of other popular genres such as science fiction, romance, and action-adventure; time travel makes use of improbable devices and extravagant paradoxes, and in general lays claim to only a small share of the plots, topics, or themes that could conceivably interest a reader, writer, or critic of literature. On the other hand, since even the most elementary narratives, whether fictional or nonfictional, set out to modify or manipulate the order, duration, and significance of events in time—that is, since all narratives do something like “travel” through time or construct “alternate” worlds—one could arguably call narrative itself a “time machine,” which is to say, a mechanism for revising the arrangements of stories and histories. In this more expansive view, literature itself might be viewed as a subtype of time travel, rather than the other way around, and time traveling might be considered a fundamental condition of storytelling itself, even its very essence.

  This book sets out, not exactly to resolve such a dilemma over the significance of time travel stories, but rather to amplify and further complicate it, even to expose some of its more provocative implications. In this respect, the book is polemical as well as analytical. I contend that there ought to be much more attention paid to the seemingly eccentric genre of time travel fiction by literary, cultural, and film theorists, as well as by readers and scholars interested more broadly in either theories of narrative or philosophies of time. If it eventually turns out that the question of time travel is tantamount to the question of narrative itself, then such a fundamental question will almost certainly have been woefully underconsidered by the very thinkers best positioned to comprehend and answer it.

  I argue that time travel fiction is a “narratological laboratory,” in which many of the most basic theoretical questions about storytelling, and by extension about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity, are represented in the form of literal devices and plots, at once both convenient for criticism and fruitfully complex. I wish to suggest not merely that time travel stories are examples or depictions of narratological or philosophical issues, but that these stories are themselves already exercises in narratology and the theorization of temporality—they are in essence “narrative machines,” more or less latent, emergent, or full blown. And following the leads they expose, the present book intends to contribute its part to a fundamental reconsideration of the philosophy of time, as well as to a fundamental synthesis of such philosophy with narrative theory, goals in the service of which time travel fiction will be regarded as a philosophical literature par excellence.

  If it seems brash for an academic critic to make such broad philosophical claims for a popular genre and, moreover, for a genre that has previously garnered only sporadic attention from academic criticism, the brashness may be mitigated by the book’s inevitably interdisciplinary focus. By necessity, I borrow and amalgamate a range of insights and information from cultural and film theory, philosophy (both analytic and continental), physics, psychology, and historiography. In each case, interpretations of the literature of time travel, chiefly of popular science fiction, serve as a kind of escort into and around these other fields. Let me begin with a few such interpretations. Each of the following three readings analyzes a single time travel story as a paradigm of a certain form of temporal manipulation, and in turn as an access into crucial aspects of narrative theory. Following these three readings, I briefly outline some of the conceptual and methodological links that such interpretations might suggest between fields of study concerned with problems of time
travel—in particular, popular literature and film, literary history and criticism, analytic philosophy, and physics. I also comment on the somewhat counterintuitive history of the genre of time travel fiction that I necessarily construct alongside the specific theoretical considerations time travel stories compel me to pursue.

  First reading: Fabula and Sjuzhet in Up the Line

  In Robert Silverberg’s 1969 novel Up the Line, the following conversation takes place between Jud Elliott, a transtemporal tour guide for researchers and vacationers journeying into the past, and his mentor in the “Time Service,” Themistoklis Metaxas. In a side plot, Metaxas is helping Jud get invited to a party in Constantinople in the year 1105, so that Jud can seduce his own “great-great-multi-great-grandmother”:

  Metaxas, as always, was glad to help.

  “It’ll take a few days,” he said. “Communications are slow here. Messengers going back and forth.”

  “Should I wait here?”

  “Why bother?” Metaxas asked. “You’ve got a timer. Jump down three days, and maybe by then everything will be arranged.”

  I jumped down three days. Metaxas said, “Everything is arranged.”1

  Here is a seemingly extraordinary narrative event, one peculiar to the temporal manipulations made possible by a time machine: the narrator, Jud, using his “timer,” is able instantaneously to skip over three full days of time, meeting up with Metaxas in the same location “down the line.”2 Silverberg constructs the conversation to reflect the unusual temporal elision enabled by the timer, skipping instantaneously between the two disconnected fragments of dialogue and treating them as continuous: “I jumped down three days . . . ‘[e]verything is arranged.’” The reader’s own perspective, which has also been made to “jump” over the same three days, is therefore allied with Jud’s experience of the hiatus rather than, for instance, with that of Metaxas, who has presumably been occupied during the entire interval. In turn, Silverberg can joke, via the deadpan substitution of tenses in the phrase “everything will be arranged/is arranged,” about the economic convenience the time machine provides for Jud, who now proceeds directly to his tryst, bypassing the labor of preparations undertaken by his colleague Metaxas. For a brief moment, whatever other unusual advantages it may offer, time travel permits the indulgence of an erotic perquisite, one that the reader shares by being positioned all the nearer, in terms of the economy of reading, to the imminent seduction.

  Although the most extraordinary element in this fragment of dialogue is surely the presence of the time machine (the timer), it is not easy to determine precisely in what its extraordinariness consists. Consider this slight rewriting of the scene, in which I merely replace the time traveler’s technical jargon with some more mundane language:

  Metaxas, as always, was glad to help.

  “It’ll take a few days,” he said. “Communications are slow here. Messengers going back and forth.”

  “Should I wait here?”

  “Why bother?” Metaxas asked. “You’ve got things to do. Come back in three days, and maybe by then everything will be arranged.”

  I came back in three days. Metaxas said, “Everything is arranged.”

  With all explicit reference to timers and jumping removed, we now have a perfectly ordinary sequence of narrative events, in which the narrator-protagonist also skips, still instantaneously from the reader’s viewpoint, three days of time. The vague “things to do” with which I have replaced “a timer” in my new version, and that Metaxas now suggests might account for Jud’s missing three days, are, in terms of the progress of the narrative, exactly as nondescript and formally empty as the three days originally “jumped” using time travel. Even the humor entailed by Jud’s avoidance of the labor Metaxas has undertaken on his behalf can be retained in the deadpan echo of the final line. Indeed, whether the skipping of three days consists, for Jud, in a physically discontinuous nothing enabled by a time machine or whether, instead, he merely expends three days in the background of the narrative doing nothing much, makes very little difference to the structure or coherence of the fiction, even though it may, of course, make considerable difference to the story’s genre.

  In short, physical time travel and metanarrative juxtaposition are, in narratological if not in generic terms, identical. Whether such identity is an artifact of the way in which specific stories are constructed or whether it has some more profound and wide-ranging narratological or even ontological significance—whether, in other words, the metanarration of time travel is truly a basic feature of the way in which we tell even the most conventional stories—remains an open question, and one that I will pursue in greater detail especially in the book’s second half. For now, the apparent structural equivalence of the time travel plot with more conventional plots should at least indicate how a time machine might duplicate some of the fundamental actions of narratives generally. The timer appears to do exactly what plots do already, but in some sense more literally.

  As Mieke Bal notes, within conventional narratives, temporal discontinuities, dilations, and repetitions occur constantly, “often without being noticed by the reader.”3 Indeed, in most stories, quite drastic manipulations of chronology on the level of form—hiatuses, flashbacks, sudden temporal cuts, overlapping events—are cheerfully tolerated by the story’s audience. Even when such manipulations are directly foregrounded, for instance by an explicitly reminiscing chronicler or by a Scheherazadean metanarrator, the reader usually has little difficulty receiving such plotlike narratological exposures as unobtrusive (if that is the author’s goal) and, in a word, “normal,” or as what Gérard Genette calls “classical.”4

  However, in a time travel story, even the most elementary experience of plot involves an essentially abnormal metanarrative intervention, since the “classical” mechanisms of temporal discontinuity, dilation, or reordering are now introduced directly into the story itself, in the guise of literal devices or mechanisms. They are no longer either tacit or formalistic but rather actual and eventlike—or, in terms of the fiction itself, real—a fact that makes time travel fiction already, and inherently, a fiction explicitly about the temporality of literary form. Simply to follow the action of Up the Line, the reader must directly relate the two divergent time frames experienced by Jud and Metaxas, and then further compare them against the hypothetical background of a metaframe that leaves entirely open the question of whether the original two time frames might ultimately be reconciled. Indeed, it is this potential irreconcilability—the possibility that, for instance, Metaxas could kill rather than solicit Jud’s “great-great-multi-great-grandmother”—that gives the science fiction reader, as well as the consumer of time travel stories in the broader culture, a glimpse of what is known as a paradox story. But even where it doesn’t eventuate in paradox, or for that matter in any logical or causal conundrum, the potential irreconcilability of narrative frames within a time travel story still potentially imparts to the reader’s experience an unusual and subversive novelty, one that automatically exposes and destabilizes some of the basic conditions of story construction.

  In short, the novelty of the time machine is simultaneously outré and utterly basic to what we accept as normal or classical storytelling. We are able to see this most clearly in narratological terms, because the time travel plot is essentially a creative abuse of the usual narratological rules, or even a direct mimesis or parody of narrative formation. Narratologists, following the tradition of early formalist criticism, distinguish between “story” and “plot,” or what the Russian formalists termed fabula and sjuzhet, a terminology I will revisit at greater length in Chapter 4.5 Fabula is the ostensible underlying sequence of story events in a narrative, sjuzhet its re-formation as a specific plot, the reconstructed montage of story elements arranged by an author within a given set of generic rules or protocols. In conventional narratives, temporal alterations such as changes of order or pace, repetitions, and the skipping of time occur on the level of sjuzhet, and th
e rules governing plot construction within genres allow for considerable and even radical variations in the order or frequency of sjuzhet events. So when Clarissa Dalloway is suddenly no longer on Bond Street but rather back at her house, or when we see Charles Foster Kane decrepit and dying in an early scene of Citizen Kane and then as a young child in a later scene, such chronological anomalies or “anachronies”6 are immediately understood to be artifacts of plot manipulation arranged on the level of sjuzhet, and not characteristic of the underlying fabula, which is presumed to remain linear and chronological. Such a presumption is tantamount to asserting that neither Mrs. Dalloway nor Citizen Kane is either a supernatural or a time travel story, and that we (readers, writers, audience, and critics) continue to assume that Clarissa “really” takes more or less the usual number of minutes to walk home from Bond Street, and that Charles Foster Kane “really” grows from childhood to old age instead of the reverse. Indeed, the presumption of chronological regularity within the underlying story material is crucial for the coherence of the classical narrative. Otherwise, the potentially extreme temporal variations of the sjuzhet would emerge as merely fragmented and anachronic. Indeed, they can easily be made to emerge that way within a variety of experimental fictions, for instance in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths,” Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint. We might even preliminarily define the “normal” narrative—so closely related to Genette’s “classical”—as one in which divergences from regular chronology occur only on the level of the sjuzhet, never in the fabula.7